- First trophy of the year!!!!! Trofeo Puerta. With a 2-0 win over Deportivo.
- Sounds like this new Brazilian defender Cicinho has been impressive.
- Signed a CB, Botia, who was on the Spanish Olympic team… As an added bonus, he played for Barcelona and their rights to him expired a month ago. So we’re sort of sticking it to them. Yay!
I think this team is slowly coming together. A lot of new faces and not a lot of time for them to gel (first game in 9 days?!?!?!). But, what the hell? Why not be optimistic, right?
9 days if the strike doesn’t happen.
It’s funny, but given the current state of la liga and sevilla’s last couple seasons, I’m starting to think that the quality and quantity of players we sign is maybe the third most important off-season predictor of next year’s success. Much more important is who we have to let go (for example our defensive struggles last year could be pinned more to losing players like Caceres than to the people we signed to replace him). Perhaps equally important is the extent to which other clubs are in financial turmoil, or perhaps better said, to what extent they are living within their means. When we play Malaga this year, no transfer will be as key as the exit of Cazorla, and against other teams the good players they let go or the improvements they couldn’t afford to make may be as or more decisive than the tactical shift Cicinho creates.
In today’s Liga, it seems like you win not by what you gain each summer but rather by not having to lose as much as everyone else. It’s a new kind of arms race for la otra liga.
great points jeremy. by the team consistency standard we actually had a very good offseason. only player who contributed to our team meaningfully last year who will be gone is kanoute. of course… we had our worst season in about 8 years last season.
id also add coaching consistency and coaching quality as two more important non-player signing factors that dictate a teams success. we certainly havent had any coaching consistency since juande left and (partially as a result) it is uncertain to what degree we have had coaching quality. michel is getting his chance with a full offseason. i really hope he surprises me and we start playing better than it seems like we did during the offseason.
Cicinho, yes looks good. As for Botía, would have preferred Gustavo Cabral (Argentine on loan to Levante and not settled) has the best defensive stats in la liga for the last 16 games, by a country mile.
(158 balones recuperados, 40 perdidos, ratio 4:1)
I haven’t been happy with the quality of signings for several years, it might be better if I don’t say anymore, although I will if I am invited to come back on that matter.
Nice site Monchis Men.
please do come back and tell us a lot more. for starters, where do you get your defensive stats?
thanks for coming by and you are always welcome. the site (for obvious reasons) gets much busier when the season gets going, but i think for all of us here, we just enjoy getting to chat about the team in the comments. especially for those of us who dont speak spanish very well, its a rare outlet to have a place to chat about la liga in a non-messi/ronaldo centered forum.
cheers
Hi again, first of all, I really like the name of the blog.
I’m planning to start a new website at the end of August, you’ll be able to see the stats then. I’m using the name messiorondaldo to get attention and traction. My name is Tim and I live in Sevilla and I’m Sevillista.
To me, we are buying players of certain profiles, you could say they are casino long shots. We need to concentrate on buying square pegs for square holes etc, it’s ridiculous that Navas, one of the best players in the world, has had to wait since Alves for a player that functions with him.
It looks like Cicinho will function with Navas which is of paramount importance. We then need to get the left side functioning and the midfield, the defence is OK in my opinion.
Remember, Brian Clough won the European cup with Trevor Francis and ten cheap players, the cheap players could all pass and control the ball, they had the basic skills, which is more than Konko or Romaric ever had.
“To me, we are buying players of certain profiles, you could say they are casino long shots.”
This has been a popular topic here for awhile: the transition the club made from early in the decade of being a very small club making very smart purchases of cheap no-name unproven players to later being a club trying to buy the more expensive and more highly touted players that supposedly befit a team qualifying for Europe every year. This is an extremely difficult transition to make, and the past 5 or so years seem to indicate that management does not have the skill set required to pick the best of €5-10 million euro transfer targets, or at any rate are much better at picking out talent from the €1-3M pile.
I think another factor here is the improvement of the Brazilian economy. Monchi talked recently on Twitter about how that country’s economic improvement has made Brazilian transfers more expensive over the last decade, and I think that as Sevilla’s profile improved during the 00′s, and Brazil’s economy also made the “cheap” transfers there more expensive, it made sense to shop in the more contested (and thus costly) European market instead of paying the same amount of money for a South American player who might or might not pan out. Obviously that didn’t work out so well for the team, but it’s been interesting to see how Sevilla’s own situation has interacted with world market and football market realities, and how that has been a problematic set of changes for the club to respond to. At any rate this year’s transfer haul seems to be driven by a nice balance of cheap South American talent (Rabello! Cicinho!) and some smart economical established choices like Diego Lopez and Kondogbia.
jrmrhr
I didn’t explain very well, I’ve been quite happy with the signings ever since Negredo (a brave and genius purchase). I think it was just before, 2007/2008, when they were questionable, and maybe that was trying to adjust to the demands of Champions League.
Cicinho, Rabello, Medel are five star signings.